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The 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series season has been an intriguing one. Here’s a look at what’s hot and what’s not so far this year.

WHAT’S HOT

Chevrolet

2015 has unquestionably been the Year of the Bowtie. Chevrolet was already enjoying a slight advantage over Honda with the current generation of engine and has claimed all three manufacturer’s titles since returning to IndyCar racing in 2012. But this season’s introduction of aero kits, which are wings and sidepods custom designed by manufacturers to individualize their cars, has widened the performance gap even further. Fortunately, the two biggest teams — Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske — are fielding four cars each and some smaller Chevy teams have mounted surprisingly strong campaigns, so there’s still been plenty of competition.

Team Penske

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Penske and Ganassi have long been the two strongest teams in IndyCar but this year it’s Penske who’s on top, owning roughly 50 per cent of victories and even more dominance in qualifying. It helps, of course, that the team is coming off its first title after an eight-year drought, won last year by Will Power. A number of key engineering talent acquisitions over the off-season are helping carry the momentum.

Juan Pablo Montoya

It’s a funny thing about motor racing — many great drivers end up particularly excelling at one formula. Juan Pablo Montoya is clearly one of them. Montoya has won in every discipline he’s tried, of course, but it still drew surprise from onlookers that he failed to set the world on fire in Formula One and NASCAR after winning both the CART title and the Indianapolis 500 on his first try at each. Now, at 39 years old and a full 15 years after his rookie triumph at Indy in 2000, he’s won the 500 again — that’s two victories at the Brickyard in three starts. Add to that a second win to start the season in St. Petersburg and it’s obvious that Montoya is enjoying a homecoming.

Graham Rahal

In this two-tiered season it’s natural to seek out a best-of-the-Hondas, but no one expected that driver to be Graham Rahal. He won the first unified IRL/Champ Car race at St. Petersburg in 2008, but apart from co-driving to an overall Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona win four years ago he hasn’t accomplished much in recent years. This season, though, he was the top-finishing Honda in the Indy 500 and has multiple podiums, making him the only Honda entry who looks poised for a victory on sheer pace. The fact that his team — co-owned by his father, Bobby Rahal, and the now-retired David Letterman — is only fielding one car this year makes the achievement all the more remarkable.

Brian Barnhart

“Hot” may not be the right term here, but Brian Barnhart deserves a tip of the hat. He’s returned to the helm in race control, and pundits were worried that some of Barnhart’s divisive decision-making patterns might resurface. So far, that hasn’t been the case. Penalties have been delivered consistently. Montoya and Power were making their cars very wide in the waning laps of the Indianapolis 500, and race control quite rightly let them race it out. Most importantly, officiating hasn’t been a headline this season, keeping attention on track where it belongs. So far, so good.

WHAT’S NOT

Honda

On aero-kit development Honda just plain missed the mark, and at the moment its teams are vying to be Best of the Rest. The marque does have one victory with Canada’s James Hinchcliffe, though that was more from fortuitous pit strategy than outright performance. Honda has been permitted to make some changes to their kits and rolled out a dramatically different front wing design for the races in Detroit May 30, so there’s still hope here for a late-season improvement.

Andretti Autosport

Not helping Honda’s cause is that its once-flagship team, Andretti Autosport, hasn’t been performing to its usual standards in 2015. Ryan Hunter-Reay, Marco Andretti, and Carlos Muñoz have all largely been non-factors, and the fourth team has dealt with a constant struggle for funding. Some big engineering names left this team over the winter but were replaced by equally big ones. The updated structure just doesn’t seem to have gelled quite yet.

Simon Pagenaud

Perhaps the most surprising name missing from the top of the charts this year is Simon Pagenaud. The 2010 ALMS champion won a pair of races last season and garnered the attention of Roger Penske, who assembled a fourth team to bring Pagenaud into the fold. But so far, Pagenaud’s No. 22 is the only one in the stable that’s been missing from the top of the standings. Pagenaud is a talented driver, so this may be a sign of a chemistry issue behind the scenes.

Sage Karam

Sage Karam is another driver in a seriously competitive car, his being with Chip Ganassi Racing, though his results have been more disastrous. Perhaps not all of his issues have been entirely his fault, but a pair of solo incidents at NOLA Motorsports Park stood out like sore thumbs. Now 20 years old, Karam rocketed through the Mazda Road to Indy driver development system exceptionally young. His age would normally offer time for some grooming, but instead he needs to hustle before Ganassi runs out of patience and he loses his last best shot at the big time.

The schedule

The elephant in the room is that the IndyCar schedule is still in rough shape. All signs point to another seven-month off-season next year with a March opener and a new street race in Boston on Labour Day weekend in 2016 (though admittedly no one has called Boston a season finale yet). A pair of races at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in three weeks is hurting the road course event’s ticket sales. And whose idea was it to go to New Orleans during rainy season? Motorsport scheduling is a challenge, no doubt, but IndyCar’s needs far more

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